Beginner Guide
Everquest Next Landmark - A Beginners Guide Note: Some previously unknown changes are being put into the Closed Beta, will update this guide once all the changes have been released. So you just got a key or bought a Founders Pack, you created an SOE account, downloaded the game client, logged in, created your character, and selected a server. At which point you find yourself standing near a building that looks like this, the Portal Spire. At first you should make yourself familiar with the game controls and commands. Now you could just run off and start exploring but if you do, you will find before long you have to come back to the Spire, which may be a long walk. So before you run off you will want to make a quick stop. On the Spire is a Stone Forge, go over and click on it, you will want to find the resources needed for these four things: #Copper Pick (Pick Category) #Copper Axe (Axe Category) #Stone Forge (Crafting Station Category) To find how much Copper you will need, also look at the Copper Ingots under the Metal category. Don't panic at the 100 copper per ingot, you will likely get 500 to 1000, or more, copper ore per vein. The Elemental Copper will drop randomly from copper veins, but you can usually get one or so from each vein. And the Heartwood is a guaranteed drop, one from most trees (the tree's that don't drop it you can't harvest, yet). Now you're just about ready to go exploring but you're going to need to equip an axe and a pick if you are going to be doing any gathering. If you bought a Founders Pack you will have a Founder's Pickaxe and it will serve as both an axe and a pick. If you just won or were given a key code, you will only have the Stone Axe and Stone Pick. To equip them, open your inventory (you can hit "I" on your keyboard or click the bag icon on the menu bar in the lower left hand corner). Then just drag the Axe and/or Pick from you inventory to your action bar. You will also notice a few other items in your bag, you will see an Add Tool, Delete Tool, and a Heal Tool. These are the very basic tools needed for building, so for now you can just leave them. We'll discuss building along with those and other tools a bit later. For those that want to jump right in to the social aspect of the game type "/join general" (without quotes). This will put you in the servers general channel so you can see and join in on conversations. Also I would strongly recommend that you get yourself setup on the Everquest Next Landmark Forums, so you can ask questions. Almost anything you need to know is likely already there, whether it was posted by the dev's in the News and Announcements, or ask and answered by players. And should your question not already been asked, it serves as the best place to get it answered. Are you still standing at the Spire? If it were me I wouldn't, in fact I ran off a bit too quickly. Now get your loitering self moving, go explore, chop some trees, mine some ore. There is tons to do and too little time to get it all done. Mining & Lumbering So as you start to move away from the Portal Spire you'll likely see a discolored spot on the ground, possibly even copper-ish in color, well you can't mine it as your too close to the Spire. Note the message at the bottom of the screen and in your "Default" chat tab. Once you're clear of the Spire a message saying "You may now mine, place blocks and place a claim" will come up, which is self explanatory. Mining First you need a mine-able node, a copper one should do as you need a fair amount of it and it is likely the only thing you can mine at this point. There are nodes everywhere, so finding one should be fairly easy. Once you have found one equip your pick by clicking its action bar button or hitting its assigned hot key. You will see a blue circular reticle (red if its too far from your character to mine) on the ground where your cursor was/is. Line it up with the node and click. First thing you see is stuff go flying, followed by a modest indent in the ground and/or node, and then the "Loot" tab in the chat window will start blinking red. Click the Loot tab to see what you just picked up. You could see Dirt, or Stone, or Sand, or Snow, or Ice, depending on what materials were in close proximity to the node, and if you hit the node, likely some Copper. But you will quickly notice there is still copper on the ground. The vein runs a little ways so click and hold down the mouse button this will start a non-stop mining action, but you have to direct where it mines so if you hovering over regular ground you will not get copper. Now pay attention, as you remove material, being able to see the node gets tough. You can hold down the right mouse button to change your camera angle, and you will likely need to use Shift + Scroll Wheel to zoom in. Follow the vein to the end, this may require you remove some extra ground to be able to reach and/or see all the copper. Also note that at the end of the node you may run into Tin which, if you have a Founders Pick axe, you can mine as well. If you wish to see exactly everything you picked up you may notice that it isn't in your regular inventory. There are two tabs in your inventory, one for gear, and crafted items, (also material overflow) and a Materials tab. The materials tab has the nine little squares on it. This is good time to see all the various materials you will be finding as you advance. Once you have finished mining you will want to unequip your pick as changing your view with the left mouse button is much easier when moving around. You can unequip by either clicking the pick on the action bar or hitting its assigned hot key, or hitting the Escape Key (ESC). Lumbering By now you either have seen some trees or maybe you jumped ahead an ran straight for a tree. This is fairly straight forward, just like with mining equip an axe, but unlike mining you will not get a blue (or red) reticle. Instead when you hover over a tree, the tree will have an orange-ish outline. If it doesn't have an orange-ish outline it is likely on another players claim, or you may have ran into one you can't lumber yet (could also be bugged). And once you're close enough to chop it down your cursor will turn into an axe icon. Click and hold down the mouse button to start chopping, you will see a green progress bar hovering on the tree. Chop till it's gone, once you have completed the lumbering that tree will explode and you can move on to the next one. Trees vary greatly in size and appearance. The size does dictate how much wood you will get, and the appearance can tell you if you will get Plain Wood, Burled Wood (the bane of early alpha testing) or Striped Wood. Along with the three types of wood you will find, for the time being, some Plants are being harvested (till plant harvesting is implemented) as you chop, as well as one Uncommon Wood type will be harvested from each tree. For now you will only be able to harvest Heartwood, later several other Uncommon woods will become available to you. So at this point just keep going till you have 3500 Copper, 30 Elemental Copper, 20 Heartwood, and 2000 Stone. And you likely noticed the stone in that list, don't worry if you have the copper you likely have 2 to 3 times as much stone. At some point you will have to start ditching stone. But don't just discard it as there is a way to make good use of it. Once you have all the materials you need, head back to the Portal Spire and make the Copper Pick, Copper Axe, and Stone Forge. If you have the Founders Pickaxe you will only need to make the Copper Pick as they are needed for the Bronze Pick which is better than the Founders Pickaxe. Once you have the Stone Forge you can now make everything that can be made and the Spire so you can go find a claim and start progressing through the game. Claim setup So you think you have found a prime claim location and you want to setup your claim. Well first that prime spot that looks open, may not be. There is two ways you can check if spot is claimable. First is by opening your Map, by hitting the "M" key or clicking the Map button on the Menu bar. Once the Map is open at the top middle of you screen is a box for searching for a claim, and it has a few other check boxes. Just above the "Filter" button is a "Highlight Invalid Claim ..." (it runs out of the box so part of it is not visible), check it. At which point a whole lot of the map will likely turn red with maybe a few spots retaining their ground color. You can zoom out on the map, using the scroll wheel, to see the entire area. The second option is to open the game settings, hit escape (ESC), and click "Game Settings" and then check the "View Claimable Land" box. This will turn all claimed land to red under your feet. So your seeing red, what does that mean. Well any thing that is red is not claimable. Also those thin slivers of ground that aren't red, if the claim doesn't fit in them you can not claim them either. Now if you wanting a spot near a Portal Spire you may be out of luck. But feel free to go to the Spire and use it to travel to other "islands" and servers to look for a good spot. Note the further from the Spire you go the better your chances are of finding a spot that you may like. So after looking around you have found a spot that suits your needs and isn't covered in red. Now what. Well open your inventory and right click your Claim Flag. In this mode you can Zoom in (shift + scroll wheel), far enough to actually see you character, and some details of the ground. Also the left mouse button will allow you to move the map around. And the right mouse button will allow you to move from a top down view to a side view and rotate left to right. Lastly you can use the scroll wheel to change how deep in the ground your claim gets placed. All these controls will allow you to make sure your claim is in exactly the right spot relative to various ground contours you may or may not want on your claim. Do note trees that are on the edge of your claim, because if enough of the tree is not on your claim you can not delete the tree and their branches can hang far enough out that they may interfere with a larger structures (sticking through walls). Building So now your ready to build. Well not so fast. Yes, you have the Add Tool and the Delete Tool and Heal Tool, but they are just the very rudimentary tools needed for building. There is a Paint Tool, Line Tool, Smooth Tool and Select Tool. Pointedly without the Select Tool don't even start. Feel free to play around a bit if you like but you will want to get all the tools first as they each are very much needed to make some of the nicer structures. As you become better at building you will probably reach a point at which more that 90% of the time you will use the Select Tool to even get started. To craft some tools you will need to make a better forge. Also to harvest the higher end resources you will need better picks and axes and each level of them will require a new forge as well. Practically speaking you will want to get most of your Crafting Stations built before you go too far with your grand idea. Note that while the Forge will build better Forges and Saw Tables. The Saw Tables are needed to make Work Benches, Alchemy Stations and Sifters (convert rock, dirt, sand to gems and ore). Also you are going to need to climb to some high places and building steps and/or scaffolding all over the place will get tedious. To this end they have put Grappling Hooks (bronze, viridium) in the game to make the job of working on the higher points of your structure, easier. They also come in handy when you mine a vein of ore that goes almost straight down (marble). As getting out of the whole you just dug without them requires you to dig steps, back to the surface, which can be quite a headache and take quite a bit of time. So you have all your tools you can mine any ore that is available and now you're hoping I have all the great tips and tricks to making jaw dropping building. While I may know a lot of the tricks, this is a Beginners Guide not and intermediate or advanced guide. And in truth it would take a very exhaustive set of guides to cover the other aspects of building to which ends many of the other alpha testers have put together some great Guides here on this Wiki, on the Landmark Forums and on YouTube. I will leave you will some links to some of the fantastic techniques that were discovered (yes some were unknown to the developers) during the alpha testing phase, that as you progress you will find very useful for building with. *Micro-Voxels (youtube videos) *Inlaid Patterns *Anti-Voxels *Zero Data Voxels *Cylinders and Circles (can be used to make arches) Now go have some fun and when you have made your master piece make sure you show us in the forums. Bugs A quick unrelated note before I leave you about reporting bugs. Its alpha *cough*, I mean closed beta, so first just expect them, yea they are a headache but you knew coming into this there was going to be quite a few. To post a bug report you can either, use the Bug Reports section in the forums, or you can, in game, use /bug to open a dialog box to submit a bug. The more details and information you can provide, the easier it is for the the dev team to track them down and get them fixed. Category:Guides